Originally published in the Winter/Spring 2025 edition of the Virginia Defender, issue 76, printed March 26. Reproduced here for accessibility and archival purposes. To find other stories in the Winter/Spring 2025 issue or to download the full PDF, see this post. For other issues dating back to 2012, see the Full Issues page.

In Richmond’s Shockoe Bottom, at the corner of 16th and East Broad streets, there is a small, untidy, white brick building once occupied by a sandwich shop called The Daily Grind.

Built in 1932–33 for the Barnes Coal Company, the building was then used by the Reams Coal Company. Records don’t indicate the building’s uses between 1960 and 1992, when the sandwich shop opened. A fire shut that business down within a year and it has stood vacant, tagged and littered with trash ever since.

The building sits at one entrance to the Shockoe Bottom African Burial Ground. Last Oct. 10, a new state historic highway marker was unveiled there, describing this first municipal cemetery established for the city’s Black residents, enslaved and free (1799–1816), and the second, the Shockoe Hill African Burying Ground (1816–1879). Both cemeteries were long forgotten until community struggles forced the city government to recognise them.

In March 2024, the city of Richmond and the Shockoe Project planners approved an idea initiated by the Defenders’ Sacred Ground Community Advisory Group for a community-centered art project, using the small brick structure, which sits in the middle of the Shockoe Project park area.

This art project is meant to serve as an example of how the Shockoe Project as a whole can materially benefit the descendant community. One Advisory Group member recommended that we contact Nicole Jones, deputy director of Art180.org, a 26-year-old community nonprofit arts space, gallery and creative arts collective that works with area young people, including those who have experienced incarceration as children.

Jones, recently elected to represent the 9th District on Richmond City Council, turned the planning over to Maurice Leoni-Osion, Art180’s director of programs and artist development, and Dallas Rockamore, the organization’s program manager.

Their proposal for an artist-led, youth art project called “Architects of Afrofuturism: Afrofuturistic & Ancestral Blueprints Shockoe Bottom” is an ambitious game plan for multidisciplinary art events that also provide economic support for the young participants.

With its long history of urban art making with Richmond’s young people, Art180 is a perfect partner for this project. There is still work to do, including fundraising, but if all goes well, Richmond’s young artists will be responsible for the first public art to grace the Shockoe Project site since planning began in 2023.